1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information presentation apparatus and an information presentation method and more particularly to the apparatus and the method which are arranged to search for data meeting a condition specified by a user among lots of data distributively located on a communications network and display the specified condition and the relevant data in a form of visually joining both with each other.
2. Description of the Related Art
There have been traditionally proposed many technologies of collecting and presenting information in an environment having many computers connected through a communications network. As a typical prior art, the JP-A8-212257 may be referred. This prior art is arranged to collect information pieces and edit the collected information pieces in any form so that the edited result may be easily referenced. In summary, this prior art is operated to create a virtual information sheet of paper, paste the collected information pieces on the information sheet, and present the result so that it may present the information pieces collectively for each topic.
However, the foregoing prior art has the following shortcoming. In this art, plural information pieces about one topic are pasted on one sheet. In a case that lots of information pieces concern with the same topic, the mutual relation among those information pieces is obscure. The information collection form is defined as one type of form in which the relevant information pieces are pasted on the information sheet. Hence, this information collection form disallows information pieces about one topic to be separated into those about some subtopics or be displayed in a multi-dimensional manner.
The present invention is made in consideration of the shortcoming the foregoing prior art involves. It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and an apparatus which are arranged so that a user who are anxious to collect information distributively located on a communications network may easily collect his or her target information pieces, arrange the collected information pieces in a form intended by the user, and present the arranged information pieces.
In carrying out the object, according to an aspect of the invention, an information presentation apparatus includes an information organization structure editing unit for being inputted with plural terms and a relation among the terms by a user and storing them as an information organization structure, a search condition creating unit for creating a search condition of information from the terms and the relation among those terms stored as the information organization structure, an information collecting unit for searching information storing means on the created search condition and collecting locational information of each data unit meeting the search condition, and a collection result joining unit for visually joining the terms and the relation among the terms stored as the information organization structure and the searched locational information of the data units when they are displayed.
The information collecting unit may operate to transmit the search condition to an information server through a communications network and receive the searched locational information of the data units from the information server.